For most people, reading the words “Erosion” and “Gore” in reasonable proximity evokes the visions of melting polar caps and corroding soil beds popularized by the former ex Vice President and current Noble Prize winner in his documentary-cum-caution call to the world, An Inconvenient Truth. So it’s not without a bit of irony and a certain self-aware eco-consciousness that the team at Tempe Arizona’s Gore Design chose to model and name their “Signature Erosion Sink” after that very process that may be our undoing.

I say “our” because—and the whole tenor and tone of Gore Design’s website would suggest they concur—that there’s more than a smidge of hypocrisy in the Green Movement’s supposed desire to “save the earth”; or, as the late, great George Carlin had it, “The earth will be fine. The earth will shake us off like nothing more than a bad case of fleas. What we care about is a clean place to live.” The point is that there’s nothing wrong with saying it like it is, that our trendy concern about the state of the environment has more to do with the survival of the human race than the state of the great blue ball on which we live. Of course, the two are part and parcel of the same equation, and Gore Design’s point may be that we shouldn’t take the admirable goal of cleaning up our mess so damn seriously all the time…

So, forthwith, the humorous yet aesthetically captivating Erosion sink. Constructed of Gore’s patented Glass-Fiber Reinforced Concrete (GFRC), traditional concrete’s “better-looking, stronger son,” the namesake having “met its death at the hands of an unknown assailant sometime during the night in early 2004.” The comment is par for the course for Gore, as the firm celebrates advancements in materials science as one quotient of an environmentally-conscious outlook that eschews plastics, chemical finishes, and heavy-metal pigments, while embracing reclaimed and non-toxic materials.

Erosion does all of the above while articulating a new aesthetic and textural palette for a basin. Looking, in turns, like an aerial view of the undulations of the earth, a topographical map, and a sandbar whose contours are fluctuating with the tide, Erosion is both a comment on the current state of our “immersion” into the loaded topic of climate change, as well as an inventive new contribution to our kitchen/bath lexicon. But don’t be fooled, Gore’s GFRC is sure to withstand the pervasive flow of domestic water, in spite of the appearance of its tantalizing oscillations. As for the earth’s actual sandbars? I guess that’s up to us.